About

Dr Will Amos is Associate Professor in the Translation and Transcultural Studies section of SMLC. Will holds a BA (Hons) in French Studies, an MA in Modern Languages, and a PhD in Sociolinguistics, all from the University of Liverpool. Before joining the French department at Warwick in 2017 and then TTS in 2021, Will held positions at the universities of Liverpool, Lancaster, and Lorraine (France), and worked with the AHRC theme 'Translating Cultures' (2013-17).

Research

Will's research interests are in sociolinguistics, linguistic landscapes (LL), multilingualism, language, gender, and sexuality, and transculturalism in non-literary contexts. Will's current research centres on identity performance and interpretation through clothing. Following a project on representations of femininity in French slogans on t-shirts, he is currently involved in an international collaborative project exploring school uniform and gender ideologies in the UK, South Africa, and Thailand. This takes a cross-disciplinary approach (social semiotics, gender studies, behavioural psychology) to analysing how boy/girl gender binaries inform uniform design and policies, their policing by teachers, and the 'genderneering' of young people.

Elsewhere, Will has published articles on simultaneity and language mixing in French commercial advertisements, hierarchical multilingualism on bilingual French/Occitan street signs, and ethnolinguistic identity in Liverpool's chinatown. He is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Linguistic Landscapes alongside Robert Blackwood and Stefania Tufi (Routledge, 2024), and has written book contributions on protest and dissent in the LL, developing contexts of Corsican public writing, experimental models for conducting large-scale empirical LL research, and institutional identity construction and maintenance through language. In 2021, Will co-founded the WE•ID Wearable IdeologiesLink opens in a new window interdisciplinary research network. Will is also a member of the Languages in Coventry Research GroupLink opens in a new window and the Centre for Digital EnquiryLink opens in a new window at Warwick.

Teaching and supervision

Will's teaching interests are in linguistics and sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language ideologies, language and gender, and transcultural studies. He would be keen to supervise postgraduate study in any of these areas, especially cross-disciplinary linguistic landscape studies, dealing with any language (subject to appropriate co-supervision where necessary).

Publications